Mind Performance Hacks

Hack #31. Adopt a Hero

Break down the walls of what you think of as reality; you might find some interesting solutions. A problem to you might not be a problem to someone you adopt as a hero.

Suppose you are writing a screenplay. Here are some examples of questions you might ask yourself when you are stuck:

• With my character Fred's luck, what would happen next?

• What would happen next in a 1940s movie musical?

• What would happen next in a dream?

Some of your most fruitful thinking can occur when you deliberately switch to another way of looking at things. You can think of these switches as being like key changes in a piece of music. For example, you can obtain useful effects by unexpectedly switching "keys" in the middle of a work of fiction from space opera to soap opera.

Modulating from the sublime (such as sainthood) to the ridiculous (such as platform shoes in a 1970s disco) is a comic effect known as bathos, but it's equally possible to modulate from the ridiculous back to the sublime. James Joyce's book Finnegans Wake often fuses chords of the sublime, the ridiculous, and the grittily political not just within a paragraph or a sentence, but often within a single word. (You can, too, if you put your words in the blender [Hack #50].)

Changing conceptual keys works for all forms of art—at least, in some situations. Imagine that you're an architect or an interior decorator. You might decide that you want the entry to a house to have Gothic sweep, but that a more intimate interior ...